The problem with bots and how to fix them...

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aimladen wrote:

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what collage was that you went to again? was it in US and A?

again, college. And yes, USA, child.

that explains a lot

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IP Ban CAN be implemented, but it's insanely stupid, ...

This is totally true. The snarl of what happens after you do an IP ban is what makes it business-inappropriate. It's just a simply awful idea. Anyone who is proposing IP based bans only has a superficial understanding of the internet at best.

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...that explains a lot...

Well it's rather embarrassing, to say the least. One does not question the educational status of another in the same sentence where you inadvertently slam your own. ;-P

"Collage." Really.

botters are, for the most part, tech-savvy types who can and will find holes in your security and rebound from bans... trying to stop them directly is very difficult...

on the other hand, the average rmt consumer isn't nearly as tech-savvy, invests heavily in the game, and would be devastated by an account deletion...

no point in going after the botters, too slippery, just hammer the shit out of their customer base... automatically send reports of all trades to support for review, perhaps add some filters to autoflag some as lopsided... aim for zero rmt repeat business...

The problem there is you have to be very careful of false positives, both accidental and 'engineered'

If I were a RMT company who's livelihood depended on people buying orbs from me and GGG threatened that by banning my customer base, know what I would do? I would take all these exalted orbs that are completely useless to me without customers, that can get users banned for being in possession of them coming from my accounts, and I would distribute them to as many random people as possible, using any means possible. After innocent people start getting banned, GGG's most reasonable course of action would be to back out before the resulting shitstorm destroys their game community. If they don't, I just continue until the game is dead. I likely have other operations on other games, they won't be so lucky.

fuck that shit

if ggg sees people getting free exalts in trades, they should ban the crap out of them

if you legit get free exalts in trades, don't be surprised by ban, and have a case for appeal prepared... and don't be too terribly surprised if you lose the appeal...

all ggg would have to do is officially state the above.... probably with less profanity...

What happens if you're fighting a boss in a group, and somebody drops an exalt just as it's killed?

Tough...

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gilrad wrote:

What happens if you're fighting a boss in a group, and somebody drops an exalt just as it's killed?

support's report (hopefully) shows such activity... as well as how many other players are nearby...

im not saying its all automatic... there's still an art to it... im just saying that going after the customer is by far the path of least resistance here... they are the weakest link in the botter/rmt chain

A single exalt with no other trading records is unlikely to be worthy of an action. Particularly when you consider what damage even a little bit of bad word of mouth can do to your company (to wit: a single exalt transaction with no trade isn't obviously RMT, and banning someone for that could offend a legitimate non-cheating customer who will have a very, very long memory).

However, larger patterns of actions like this are a huge indicator, and more to the point, you can identify the giver, and see what else they do. If they "give" items to many different folks you have identified the RMT source. Once you have affirmatively identified that, you are pretty safe in doing a full ban sweep of all receivers as well.

This is so obvious, I would think that people would drop on the ground and pick up off the ground to avoid the obvious and easy logging mechanism for trades. That means that GGG needs to instrument a log of drop to ground and then picked up. Yet more instrumentation, and so forth.

Quickly this becomes a game of "link analysis." It would be a PITA.

Sold currency is delivered mostly via a new account and not via in game trade.